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I'm trying to use a bunch of sundcards (8 usb + 4 hdmi + 1 mobo) to control different zones separately & combine them in cool ways.

I'm having trouble getting pulse to recognize all of my soundcards' existence.

"aplay -l" recognizes all 13 cards, as does "pacmd list-cards", but pulse only recognizes 10 of them (0-9). It seems to find them in the "pacmd dump", but not in "list-sinks."

my "pacmd info" file loads all the modules correctly, but I can't figure out why "list-sinks" doesn't list them.

cyrusv
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1 Answers1

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If ALSA recognizes your sound cards then you can try to add them to PulseAudio manually with pacmd load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:x,y where x and y is the device, subevice pair of aplay -l.

If it works correctly then you can append these commands to the default configuration of PulseAudio (/etc/pulse/default.pa). (I know that it's only a hack, but it works for me :)

tbalazs
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  • That worked fine with some of the sinks, but others just replied "Module load failed." – cyrusv Nov 30 '11 at 22:45
  • That worked fine with some of the sinks, but others just replied "Module load failed." A funny pattern is that all the cards that fail to load as sinks happen to be listed after the HDMI sink in "aplay -l". Do you know how I could play with the order of loading the modules? Or maybe it's put in that order because they fail to load. It's all very fishy. I'll paste the verbose error report as well. Thanks for the help – cyrusv Nov 30 '11 at 22:51
  • Look around in your system log for the module loading error, it's quite possible that you don't have the right permissions to the device. – tbalazs Nov 30 '11 at 22:55
  • Couldn't find anything outstanding in the logs. All the cards are identical, so I don't think that permissions would be an issue anyway. If i reconfigure the USB connections, other cards will work, but there doesn't seem to be any pattern. – cyrusv Dec 01 '11 at 00:37
  • Furthermore, if I specify an ALSA hw:X,Y that fails to load in Pulse, the audio plays out of the default alsa hw:0,0 instead of hw:X,Y. Could there be some confusion in finding the right directory for the soundcard? – cyrusv Dec 01 '11 at 00:39
  • I don't really know why the module loading failing, but once a card properly recognized by PulseAudio you can define the sink per application. – tbalazs Dec 01 '11 at 07:54
  • Sometimes Indexes get swapped during boot... Maybee they swapped ... this is why in "~/.asoundrc" or "/etc/asound.conf" define sound card names and use the defined names in pulseaudio "default.pa" file. – 71GA May 18 '14 at 20:47
  • Have you tried ```load-module module-combine-sink sink_name=combined``` and ```set-default-sink combined``` – MoFu Sep 16 '15 at 13:39